In our campaign the party has acquired a considerable fame throughout the city as well as a little establishment as base of operations.
A couple of sessions back, while we were otherwise engaged, the house was trashed by some foes and a young squire was abducted. We easily dealt with that, but the safety issue remains: bad people can take advantage of our public identity. That's cool, I even prefer dealing with "logistic" problems than dungeon crawling, but I wasn't sure how to address the problem using the rules.
Certainly the caster can set a handful of traps and alarm systems to discourage the ill-disposed, but, since the caster is an unreliable chaotic halfling, my pragmatic, magic intolerant cavalier was looking for a more mundane option.
As a joke I took the core rulebook, found the page where the "dog, guard" entry is and asked the DM:"for +300gp can I have it masterwork?"
Jokes aside I really like the idea of having a guard dog much more than just having a trap: the trap sits there, a dog, you can pet, toss a bone (or even an annoying halfling), but a simple guard dog is not going to do anything. The party is nearly at level 9, any minion our opponents are going to send is going to be around level 10/12, the dog would probably not even notice them sneaking around and, even if it does, he is going to be sausages before rolling initiative.
There must be somewhere in Westcrown somebody who sells 5th level Rottweilers. I don't want an animal companion, a horse and a cohort are enough to drag around already, just a drooling, growling trespassing deterrent for the house. The question is:"How much would that cost?"
There are different ways I tried to answer this: calculate the cost of a trap with similar effect, calculate the cost of training such animal as a professional, or try to make a guess starting from the 25gp of a mundane dog.
If a wizard sets a self-resetting trap, summoning a dire-wolf when a stranger comes it would cost 16k gp, maybe too much, but we have to think that the trap would also have the surprise effect in it, a guard dog would advertise its presence way before the trespasser is in the property.
Training a guarding dog takes 4 weeks, wit a DC20, so an artisan with +10 in handle animal can easily take 10 and do it with no problems. If we treat the HA skill like a craft in this case it would be a 40 gp worth job. We could multiply the artisan level (somewhere around 8 I would say) and the animal level square, leading to a total of 8k, like a +2 sword or a +3 armor.
While the first esteem seems a little too much, this second seems more likely. Any thoughts on this?
There are price listings for other animals with considerably higher CRs (either in Ultimate Equipment or Animal Archive, possibly both, at any rate they definitely are on d20pfsrd.com), while these aren't dogs, you can use them as a guideline to derive a fitting price, based on CR, for a dog that you advanced by a few HD.
Thanks for the suggestion, I don't have the manuals themselves, but makes sense to confront similar beasts for pricing, and seems they cost much less than what I was expecting, I'll buy an entire pack! : )